The Fan Who Wasn’t There

The Blazers are scorching. Why are seats empty at the Moda Center?

MISSING THE PARTY: Trail Blazers president and CEO Chris McGowan says the team has begun using a flexible pricing system to draw fans to the Moda Center. “I don’t want fans to miss out on what’s going on,” he says. “It’s electric.” - Photo by Ryan Prouty, Portland Trail Blazers

A seat at the Portland Trail Blazers’ Dec. 12 home game against the Houston Rockets should have been a hot ticket.

The matchup at the
Moda Center featured the Blazers, the NBA’s hottest team, hosting two of
the league’s superstars, Houston center Dwight Howard and guard James
Harden. The game received marquee treatment by cable network TNT. And it
was the most recent chance to see Blazers forward LaMarcus Aldridge
cement his case as a surprise MVP candidate.

Little wonder the game was officially a sellout, with an announced crowd of 19,997.

But 36 minutes before
the announced tipoff, I walked up to the Moda box office and bought a
nosebleed Section 327 seat for its $25 face value.

I paid too much. Ten
minutes later, prices on the online ticket resale site StubHub dropped
to as low $11.20 for a seat in Section 326. (That’s the same cost as
seeing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug in theaters.) A seat in the 100 Level, typically priced at $168, was going for $78.

The bargain prices
point to a strange Moda Center phenomenon: The best Blazers team in
years is playing to crowds noticeably short of capacity and ticket
demand weaker than you might expect for a team that went into Tuesday
night’s games with the NBA’s best record.

At tipoff, I was the only person in my row, and during the game the arena looked to be about 85 percent full.

“We’re in first
place,” said Jamie Unger-Fisk, a fan in Section 327. “How do you not
come out to see the team when we’re in first place?”

It’s a question Blazers fans—and people in the team’s front office—are trying to answer.

The Blazers rank sixth in the league for announced home attendance, averaging 19,334 spectators a game.

But the size of the
Moda Center—the league’s third-largest arena—means the Blazers are in
the middle of the pack for filling up their building. The average of 93
percent attendance is 13th in the NBA, according to ESPN.

Fans—after years of
frustration, and a 13-game losing skid to end last season—remain wary
about spending money to support the team.

“The fans in Portland
are still getting used to having one of the best teams in the league,”
says Syracuse University sports-marketing professor Rick Burton. “If you
haven’t won in a long time, people can end up taking a wait-and-see
approach.”

Chris McGowan, the
Blazers’ president and CEO, says the front office faces a challenge in
wooing back customers who have abandoned the team in recent years.

“Once you lose
season-ticket holders, there’s a lot of statistics in the industry that
suggest it’s hard to get them back,” McGowan says, noting season-ticket
sales are climbing now. “It’s hard to get people to come night in and
night out unless your team is really doing something special.”

Which they are. But
the Blazers, like all teams in the NBA, boost their attendance figures
by counting every seat they sell, even if the fans who bought them stay
home.

The Blazers say about
90 percent of ticket holders (those who bought tickets and those who
received them as giveaways) are coming to games.

The team won’t disclose how many seats it gives away as freebies.

Dwight Jaynes, a
commentator for CSN Northwest who has covered the Blazers for three
decades, says attendance was never as high as reported during the
195-game sellout streak the team claimed from 2007 to last year. “There
have been empty seats in that arena for years,” he says.

McGowan blamed the
empty seats at the Blazers-Rockets game on icy weather downstate, and on
corporate sales to companies that bought group tickets and provided
them to people who didn’t show.

“A crowd that’s
perceived as bad in Portland is perceived as good in other markets,”
McGowan says. “Just because there were a few empty seats in the stands, I
don’t see that as an alarming thing. If there were 14,000 people in the
arena, that might be alarming.”

Most NBA teams would
love Portland’s problem—just watch highlights of the Blazers’ Dec. 15
road win in Detroit. The Palace of Auburn Hills looked like an IKEA
chair showroom where a basketball game happened to break out.

The Blazers also need to establish a new identity that will keep fans coming back to the arena.

Brad Hoggans, a
roofer, came to the Rockets game because his son, Miles, received free
tickets from SEI Academy, a charter school in North Portland.

Hoggans recalled how
former Blazers guard Brandon Roy created excitement around the team when
he played here from 2006 to 2011. Hoggans was wearing a vintage Roy
jersey.

“A real star to get people excited,” he said, “is what we’re lacking.”

Burton, the
sports-marketing professor, says even as the Blazers improve, they face
fiercer competition for fan dollars: from the Portland Timbers, the
resurgent Seattle Seahawks and even high-definition TV.

“Sitting at home and
drinking a 50-cent beer becomes attractive to some people,” Burton says.
“They’re doing a value equation in their heads.”

But in Section 326 during the Houston game, the Nilsen family was attending a Blazers game for the 20th consecutive year.

In the third quarter,
as Aldridge ripped control of the game from the Rockets, the six family
members were at a loss as to why the seats around them were vacant.

Andrew Nilsen, 25,
noted the Blazers are off to their best start since the 1999-2000
season, when Scottie Pippen, Rasheed Wallace and Damon Stoudamire led
the team.

"In the low usage areas, we found that our vehicles sit idle four times longer, ultimately affecting overall vehicle availability for the Portland membership base, as well as parking for the Portland community."

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